Navy taps Gramma-Tech for cybersecurity work

ITHACA, N.Y., Sept. 26 (UPI) -- Software and cybersecurity company GrammaTech Inc. is to advance adaptive computing technology under a contract from the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

The advances are to enhance computer security against new cyberthreats posed by attackers using obscure combinations of software bugs or unusual behaviors.

"We are working on a new paradigm for building system security that provides the computer itself with the tools to diagnose new attacks, reason about their impact on the system, and implement counter-measures automatically," said Tim Teitelbaum, GrammaTech's chief executive officer. "We believe this so-called autonomic computing approach offers the potential for complex computer systems to police themselves, by detecting intrusion, performing self-healing, and countering cyber threats directly."

The value of the contract, its length and other detail were not provided.

GrammaTech, which develops software-assurance tools and advanced cybersecurity solutions, is a spinoff organization from Cornell University.

"Modern computer systems have become so complex that they have nearly outgrown their ability to be entirely understood," the company said. "The sheer number of software components -- and the myriad of interactions between them on a single desktop computer -- is itself a difficult security challenge that confounds modern protection technologies."